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Huge financial investments are made annually in teacher training in order to prepare prospective teachers for a career in teaching. The impact of pre-service training on prospective mathematics teachers' (n=124) content knowledge (using the Van Hiele Theory) is investigated. Results seem to indicate that prospective teachers exit their school career with higher geometric understanding than after three years of mathematics content and methodology training or after four years of methodology training. The deterioration in prospective teachers' geometry content knowledge indicates that pre-service education does not assist in maintaining or improving levels of geometric understanding. Possible contributing factors are identified such as the fragmented nature of pre-service teacher education programme and the absence of a long-term strategy connecting teacher education to teaching practice in a meaningful way. The results have serious implications for pre-service mathematics education programmes and some suggestions on the features of an improved programme are made.

Integrative-STEM methodologies entail integrating multiple disciplines with active design-centric teaching and learning methods. If math anxiety is prevalent, for teachers or students, then both the level of integration and design thinking may be limited. This quantitative study of 160 preservice teachers investigated how math anxiety was impacted by (a) a required math content course, (b) instructor teaching style, and (c) academic and disciplinary major. Significance analyses included t-tests, nonparametric tests, and effect sizes. Two teaching styles were compared: a direct teaching style and a more active, problem-based teaching style. The problem-based teaching style was shown to have substantial beneficial impact on math anxiety.

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